Ölnezea Wiki
Welcome to the Ölnezea Wiki This is a guide to the world of Ölnezea, the setting for the unpublished fantasy stories of Oliver Arditi (that's me), but more importantly, a creative work in its own right. It is inspired partly by Jorge Luis Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which he imagines a vast project to bring a world into being by writing a detailed fictional encyclopaedia, partly by the deeply imagined fictional worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake and M.A.R. Barker, and partly by the many detailed role-playing game settings I read and used in the 1980s. Many writers have developed imaginary worlds as settings for stories, but relatively few have written stories as a pretext for designing imaginary worlds; it's my intention to explore the possibilities of the fictional world as a creative endeavour in its own right — although I also devote a great deal of my energies to writing stories set in it. This wiki will initially be populated with the large quantity of background material I've already written, and will then become the repository for new material, as and when it is written. At the moment it consists exclusively of this introductory page, and one other outlining the general form of the world, but content will be added as rapidly as I can knock it into shape. The world of Ölnezea I've thought long and hard about the business of designing fantasy worlds, both before and after I started writing. Many of the values of consistency and coherence I've brought to this task I learned from writers in role-playing game magazines such as White Dwarf or Imagine, whose names I have now forgotten, but to whom I remain grateful; I realise now that many of them were informed by Lin Carter's book, Imaginary Worlds, which I read recently. For all its faults, that book outlines a vision of fantasy fiction as internally consistent and rigorously imagined with which I identify strongly. However, much of my thinking is formed in opposition to widespread assumptions in fantasy fiction. My main goals in designing this world, and writing the stories I will set in it, are as follows: * To make the world the main creative focus, rather than the story. * To question and reshape the treatment of race, gender and sexuality in fantasy fiction. * To explore the relationship between myth and fiction, or myth and history, in both linguistic and conceptual terms. * To present a critique of the casual treatment of violence in most fantasy fiction. * To make a coherent whole of language and culture, rather than using the former to decorate the latter. * To make every character a convincing expression of their culture, and to design cultures that can support convincing characters. * To involve others in creating the world, and to make it as collaborative an effort as possible. The following discussion addresses these ideas in more detail and at some length, although the discussion could be many times longer. If you have the patience to read it, you'll find out more about where I'm coming from, and what my problems are with mainstream fantasy fiction. Whether or not you can be bothered to read that, I hope you'll have some fun exploring my world of Ölnezea. A Story or a Database? I went for many years without reading fantasy fiction, and I never read very much of it in the first place. I read Tolkien when I was very young, and it had a profound effect on me, planting a seed that would grow into a deep seated conviction that there is real value in imagining worlds other than our own, at a level of depth and detail that can support a compelling sense of that world as a living breathing place in fiction. After I had read The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion I lived at least as much in Middle Earth as I did in our own world, something which I felt was vaguely foolish until I encountered Alan Moore's thoughts on the connection between fiction, myth, magic and religion, and came to understand that such narratives and systems provide us with the tools we all use to forge our identities, irrespective of their specific content. In The Language of New Media Lev Manovich suggests that the database is the characteristic cultural form of the Information Age, but for me it was a form to which I was drawn long before my computer was connected to anything else; the curated body of information, which may be browsed or accessed at the whim of the reader, has a curious attraction for me (and, I suspect, for many others). This is the 'system' half of that pair I mentioned, 'narratives and systems'. The narrative is the Norse Saga, and the system is the list of the gods and their attributes; the narrative is the New Testament and the system is Christian Doctrine; the narrative is the season of Association Football, and the system is the rules of the game, the teams, the players and their histories; the narrative is you or me, and the system is the world through which we find a path, articulating it just as it articulates us. The system, the database, the world, is the vertical axis of lexical selection in semiotics, and the narrative is the horizontal axis of semantic combination; or to put it more simply, the first is the menu, and the second is the meal. We are all most directly concerned with the meal, but the world of possibilities represented by the menu plays a part in our enjoyment. The menu permits us to make our own selections, and that affordance is the real value of the fictional world presented as such. Race and Destiny I come to this project with certain agendas. For one thing, much as I have always loved Tolkien, the more I have read and thought about his work, the less comfortable I have become with the assumptions that inform it. The enemies of good people are defined as irredeemably evil, able to be maimed and killed without moral reservation; but I always wondered about the orcs. When their craftsmen were making the various well-made tools that Tolkien '''told us they were capable of making, did they feel that same pleasure in a job well done that I sometimes feel? Did these creatures have internal narratives and subjective impressions in the same way that I do, however morally or ethically imperfect? How could I, knowing the lack of total moral probity in my own mind, possibly judge that these creatures deserved death and pain at the hands of these unmistakably Teutonic warriors that are invariably cast as the good guys? And what about elves and dwarves? What is it about these creatures that makes them 'non-human'? And why does the 'pure' bloodline of the heirs of Isildur guarantee their nobility of spirit, their good intentions and their right to rule? '''Tolkien was wishing for a world in which morality is simple, though doubtless his characters have similar psychological struggles to reflective Christians in our own world; he was wishing for a world in which the alignment between his religious beliefs and the political perspective he inherited from his class and background would be uncomplicated, beyond debate. I don't share his values, religious or political, and so I wanted to imagine a world in which identity was not so deterministically bound by inheritance and tradition; or rather, I wanted to explore these ideas. So my world is one in which certain bloodlines are important, are freighted with a burden of fate, intention and predestination, but in which they are bound for a showdown in which they will relinquish their hold on the world's defining narratives. Tolkien is all about race, and thanks to him, many other fantasies have been; Mervyn Peake is all about the stultifying weight of accumulated tradition. I want to engage with both of these things, in a way that is critical without being worthy. I have peoples equivalent to elves, dwarves and orcs, and many ethnicities of ordinary men and women, but all of them are human; all of them are people, and give me the opportunity to explore the moral and social implications of their 'elvishness’, ‘orcishness’, or whatever. I am following Ursula K. Le Guin in this approach to race, whose Earthsea sequence specifically set out to invert the conventions of white heroes and dark skinned antagonists so prevalent in fantasy, and particularly noticeable in Tolkien, as well as Robert E. Howard's influential Conan stories. Myth and History Another thing that Tolkien is concerned with, in common with the 'Northern Matter' as he termed it, with its world-ending/changing battle of Ragnarok, is the change of the world from a place of myth and moral certainty, to one of a more ambiguous, prosaic sort. This happens in stages in Middle Earth; the time in which The Lord of the Rings is set is one in which the past outweighs the present. The story takes place in an age which began with the sinking of Númenor (also known as Atalantë) and the bending of the world, so that it is no longer possible for ships to sail the 'straight path' to the land where the gods (which he had stopped calling gods by the time his work reached its published form) make their home. This is mirrored in a shift in his language from the mythic, medieval and Classically inflected prose, in which he writes his epic legends, to the rather conventional mode of realist fiction in which he writes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. ''The end of the latter book represents another moment of transition towards the mundane world in which we live, a final one in which the Middle Earth of an always-available living memory (embodied in the immortal elves and wizards), and an infallibly faithful orality (embodied in the Men of Gondor and Rohan) is supplanted by one of documentary record, of the scholastic and bibliographic past preserved by Hobbits, and their successors in the modern discipline of history. I am also interested in this bridge between a time of myth into a more historical mode of narrative and experience. My stories are set in a time which looks back to a preceding era, in which time and death were entirely contingent, unfixed quantities, and forward into another in which destiny and magic cease to be, and all universal certainties become contingent; my world is explicitly concerned with the linguistic and cognitive transition from myth to history, and from mythically determined archetype to socially constructed subject. I want to turn the distinction between two modes of narrative, and of two ways of looking at the world, into a thrilling epic story. Gender and Ecology Another way in which I want to respond to '''Tolkien' (and more to the point, his many imitators) is in the gendered fundamental ontology of my world. Tolkien's world is brought into being by a complex process, which is set in motion and determined by a male creator deity, very clearly intended to be cognate with the Christian God. With this sense of creation and divinity comes all of its baggage regarding the nature of the world, a tabula rasa on which man can write his destiny, a passive resource to be exploited indefinitely, on whose surface our dramas are staged. The first thing that I knew about my own world was that its creator deity would be female, and that the world itself would be her body; this is intended to redress a balance, certainly, in terms of both gender and ecology, but also to question the hard distinction between the physical and the spiritual that is central to Christianity and other religions. Not only is the earth mother the physical world in which my narratives are set, but the gods (which she created) are physical beings, living in regions beyond the outer fringe of human settlement. Gender is dealt with as being in some way connected to biological sexuality, but all of its socially constructed forms are up for grabs in my imagined societies, as are all forms of sexuality. This is not to say that I will be presenting a world of enlightened, non-sexist, ecologically aware cultures; far from it. I will be presenting pre-industrial societies that in most ways will be recognisable as similar to historical societies, but their constructions of gender, sexuality and ecology will be represented as an aspect of their fall from grace, rather than a pillar of the grace from which we have subsequently fallen. Language and Culture My interpretation of Tolkien (or anything else) will always be critical, but the foregoing discussion might give the impression that my endeavour is defined primarily in opposition to his work. This is not really the case. My principal relationship to Tolkien's work is one of inspiration, and it's particularly in his linguistically structured world-building that I owe him the greatest debt. What Tolkien understood, in common with relatively few fantasy writers, is that the world is apprehended and understood through the medium of language. The way we experience the world is determined by the ideas that we have at our disposal, and ideas themselves exist only inasmuch as they are attached to a form of words. George R. R. Martin, with his carefully shaped names, Ursula K. Le Guin, with Earthsea’s linguistic magic system, the sadly obscure M.A.R. Barker, 'and '''China Miéville '''in his audacious ''Embassytown, are the only other fantasy writers I've encountered that have really put this observation at the centre of their work; of these, only '''Barker followed Tolkien in building his cultures around a number of constructed languages, although Martin has had one made for him as part of the production of the Game of Thrones TV series. Even if you have trouble with the linguistic turn in contemporary thought, it should be reasonably uncontroversial to claim that cultures and societies are inseparable from the languages in which they articulate themselves. I'm not a linguist or a philologist, and I can't invent languages in a very convincing way, but I can at least decide what their histories are, what families they belong to, and produce some rudimentary grammar and vocabulary. All of my constructed proper nouns will have etymologies, and their phonic forms are systematically determined; this is a question both of creating convincing colour for the world, and more fundamentally of mapping out the ideas on which my fictional cultures are built. If every place name, every personal name, has a history and a meaning attached to it, then the cultures start to cohere at a deeper level than could be possibly be achieved in a world whose names are superficial decorations. Society and Identity Whatever Tolkien's limitations, his characters all give the impression that they were formed in his fictional cultures. This is, for me, the first task of the writer of speculative fiction. If you postulate a world which is different from our own in important ways, but then populate it with characters that appear to have grown up in twentieth or twenty-first century Earth, and that seem to be shaped by your fictional culture only in superficial ways, then what's the point of it all? I don't believe that Tolkien thought particularly hard about this; I certainly don't think he gave very much thought to characterisation. But if you have done the ground work of building societies with complete political and linguistic histories, it will more or less happen automatically. Character and setting are not distinct in speculative fiction; they are built from one another, in a duality as fundamental as that I outlined at the start of this discussion, that which unites system and narrative. Actually, this is the same duality, viewed from a slightly different angle, and any inconsistency or superficiality in one will point towards a corresponding fault in the other. William Gibson, the founder of the cyberpunk genre of SF, has made some dismissive remarks regarding the fetishising of the setting in speculative fiction, but his settings are as convincing as they come. And why? It's certainly not because of the degree of detail he works up for them, something he seems to view with distaste; no, it's because of the fundamental assumptions that inform them. A coherent understanding of the social and cultural premises of a fictional world, from which all the details can be derived, is an essential prerequisite for convincing characters, a convincing setting, or a convincing narrative. The fact that the vast majority of fantasy fiction fails to convince on any of these levels is a function of the uncritical way in which it is usually read, in contrast to science fiction. I aim to bring the rigour of the best science fiction to the writing of fantasy; and the central plank of that effort will be to make my characters the product of their societies. Latest activity Photos and videos are a great way to add visuals to your wiki. Find videos about your topic by exploring Wikia's Video Library.